Creative Commons (CC)

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that he/she has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, he/she might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of his/her own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

CC are easy-to-use copyright licenses and provide a simple, standardized way to give you permission to share and use your creative work— on conditions of your choice

Information for publishers and authors

Using Creative Commons licenses is ideal if you want to allow others to freely use your work (under the terms of the license) and use it free of charge. Authorship of the work is preserved and your work can spread, develop and inspire others

There are some things that you should think about before you apply a Creative Commons license:

Make sure you own rights to material what you want to license.

The license does not contain a warranty, so if you think there may be third party rights in the material, you may want to clear those rights in advance.

Once you apply a CC license to your material, anyone who receives it may rely on that license for as long as the material is protected by copyright and similar rights, even if you later stop distributing it.

Types of licenses

There are six different CC licenses. Two of the licenses prohibit the sharing of adaptations (BY-ND, BY-NC-ND); three prohibit commercial uses (BY-NC, BY-NC-ND, BY-NC-SA), and two require adaptations be licensed under the same license (BY-SA, BY-NC-SA):